


Two Ways to Fail at Getting at the Doctor

by Mireille



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: dw_santa, Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, F/M, Just Generally Dubious, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 02:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13777425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Curses, foiled again. And again.





	Two Ways to Fail at Getting at the Doctor

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: mindfuckery and consent issues.

It's remarkably easy to get inside the Traken girl's head, and even easier to do so undetected. She's convinced that she's dreaming, and indeed, he's drawing heavily on her own subconscious for details: the garden, so very like the one where he was trapped for so long; her clothing and her father's; what constituted fine summer weather on a planet that no longer existed. He's forgotten the little differences between his body's original appearance and its current one, but her mind supplies them: the graying brown of his hair, the lines at the corners of eyes and mouth, the facial expressions that weren't his own.

She  _wants_  to believe that it's all just her mind giving her what she wants most: her home and her father returned to her, and that's the flaw in his plan. He wanted to be certain that the projections into her mind were working properly before he put his real plans into action, but by that point, she'd convinced herself that these were dreams. Now, no matter what her mental image of her father does to her, what perversions he inflicts upon her--and he has an entire universe full of debauchery to draw upon--she believes it's her own mind doing it to her, survivor's guilt attacking her in her sleep.

There's no one to hear her cry out: the boy Adric and the Earth woman are both gone, and the Doctor keeps to himself at nights, so there's no chance of her induced nightmares waking anyone else.

He'd planned for that. He'd thought that she'd work out that someone was influencing her dreams, and eventually tell the Doctor what was happening. He's been waiting for that, in fact, waiting for the night when he can see the images in her mind: the Doctor's revulsion at the thought of what's been done to her, his guilt at knowing that he hasn't been able to keep one girl safe in his own TARDIS.

But she never realizes that it isn't her own damaged psyche at work, and so, eventually, he moves on to another plan.

****

He hasn't given up his plans to kill the Doctor; he's simply decided that he's in no hurry. He wants to make the Doctor suffer, first--and they're Time Lords; he can make it last for centuries, if he chooses, and he thinks he will. When he does, he'd like to make certain that the Doctor has plenty to occupy his mind, and what better than the knowledge that these lesser creatures he loves so much had experienced agony and humiliation purely because of their association with him.

Perhaps not  _purely_  because of that--he's a few scores to settle with this particular human fool. He's regenerated since then--his thirteenth body, an unlucky number by this planet's primitive superstitions--so he has no fear of being recognized. And who'd expect one of the most brilliant minds in the universe to turn up at a boys' school on the planet Earth?

At least, not this particular brilliant mind; it's the sort of place the Doctor would go out of his way to visit, and no matter how foolish he can be, the Doctor is, when he chooses to be, a genius.

The man standing in front of him is not brilliant, even by the crude standards of this planet. He's aging and starting to run just a little to fat, and his straight posture and gruff tones do very little to conceal that he's even more of a fool than the Master has remembered. Introducing himself as a friend of the Doctor's has stood him in good stead until now, but this old fool simply blinked at him and told him that at this hour, the man had probably gone home to his tea.

No, he doesn't know who the Master was talking about, he says; his scientific advisor at UNIT had been Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, and if he knows about UNIT, he  _must_  have signed the Official Secrets Act, so he'll know this line of questioning will have to end at once.

The Master allows himself a few seconds' idle contemplation of what an hour's torture would do to the man's pompous bearing, what he could do to make an old soldier whimper like a frightened child and plead for clean, honest pain, something he could deal with.

He almost goes through with it--the recordings would still haunt the Doctor's rest for the rest of his lives, he was certain--but a man who doesn't remember the Doctor's existence is a man who won't be able to blame the Doctor for his destruction, and that rather spoils the point of it all.

**Author's Note:**

> [me on tumblr](https://mireille719.tumblr.com)


End file.
